Progress Update on the Year of Reinvention

Its six months since I announced the Year of Reinvention in my keynote at LiveCode Global 2022. That puts us about halfway through the year, which seems like a good time for an update. I can honestly say the LiveCode product team (well I should say teams plural as we now have a number of independent teams on each project)! has never been busier. Nor have we ever invested so much in the LiveCode platform in such a short space of time. Progress is going fantastically well on the project as a whole, though as ever some areas are running a little faster or slower than originally projected.

There is so much happening that I can’t cover it all in a single post. However here is a status update on the major projects.

Script Widgets

Those of you who follow our monthly Feature Focus sessions in LCG will have seen the preview of Script Widgets last month. Put simply, Script Widgets allow you to create LiveCode controls in LiveCode Script, something previously only possible in LiveCode Builder.

Once you convert a set of controls to become a Script Widget, they can publish their own properties to the Property Inspector and be installed on the Tools Palette just as if they were a native engine object. You can use LiveCode scripts internal to the object to respond to user interaction and get and set properties. Our goal here is to bring widget writing to a much larger audience and spark a proliferation of widgets for LiveCode. We’re also going to be a huge user of this technology initially as we refresh our full control set for LiveCode 10 (below).

A Preview of the new Create Script Widget menu option in the IDE

The Script Widgets project has now been prototyped to the point we’re able to use it internally to try it out and create widgets. For full details on progress including a live demo, see last month’s LCG Feature Focus talk.

Web Engine

The web engine has made a number of strides in capability – particularly as we are now using it intensively for the upcoming web-based ide. We’ve made good gains on reducing the size of the engine, and are almost finished separating out the large blob of data the engine currently needs to run so that much of it can be omitted from many apps, reducing the size even further.

Cloud Editing

While the engine changes will be available on all platforms, the new authoring experience for LiveCode 10 will ship on the Web first. We are iterating rapidly on this project at the moment. Hardly a week goes by now without a new screen designed getting shared internally.

A Preview of the new Project Browser for our Cloud based IDE

Cloud Backend

Our cloud IDE needs somewhere to save stacks and data and our (new) cloud team has been hard at work this year creating a fully scalable backend. Under the hood we’re using AWS technologies and No-SQL, so the solution will be completely scalable to any number of app end users. At the LiveCode level you won’t need to know anything about our underlying implementation, instead you can set properties to bind objects to data or use our script level API. We’ll be the first customers of our Cloud backend, allowing you to edit your stacks in a web browser, save changes and share them with one click.

For existing customers, it’s worth noting that using our Cloud backend for data storage will be optional, if you prefer to use your own backend you are free to continue to do so.

CSS Renderer

We very excited to see how CSS gets used in LiveCode 10. Initially we’re looking at ways to apply CSS to our new Script Widgets, with full engine support across the board expected to be completed within the next quarter.

Script Compiler

Our engine team has been hard at work on the Script Compiler and we hope to have the first preview of this exciting new technology ready to show at an LCG Feature Focus within the next few weeks. The Script Compiler will boost performance and security for the entire platform. It will be just as applicable and useful on the Web as for the existing desktop and mobile platforms.

Refreshed Widget Set

One of the great things about LiveCode is that you can do anything with it. One of the more frustrating things about LiveCode is that you can do everything with it! What do I mean by that? Well, have you ever found yourself searching the forums for a script that does email address validation, or data validation, or a calendar popup, to include in your project? Every common operation can be done in LiveCode – which is amazing. And you have complete control to customize everything and get it “just right”. But you often have to go looking for a solution and that searching can extend even to some of the basics. The new widget set we are producing takes all that best practice wisdom and bottles it up in each object through properties and point-and-click.

Most of our refined object set will be based on the LiveCode Script Widget technology (above). That makes it incredibly quick to create the objects, theme them and pack them with all the features you expect.

A Preview of our Refreshed Widget Set In Development – Based on Material Design

Refreshed API Support

Our API support is in the same category as the refreshed widget set. You can connect to any API connector with LiveCode today. This project is about what we include out of the box. Rather than hunting around or reinventing the wheel, expect support for popular APIs including Stripe, Paypal, Sign On, Google Sheets and many more out of the box.

Summary

I think its safe to say that our new LiveCode 10 platform is the biggest step forward for LiveCode since version 1.0. It all adds up to greatly strengthening LiveCode’s position in the low code space.

And when will some of these exciting new technologies make it into a preview release I hear you ask? We’re working on the next preview prior to Christmas. That’s all we can say at the moment! Stay tuned for more when we have it.